Study after Berger, 1864
An art student's charcoal portrait of Lincoln, drawn to the tones of an 1864 photograph.
How it is made
lib/etching.ps's et-tonemap reads the photograph into a 240 by 300 grid of darkness, and drycharcoal draws to it in a student's order on drykit's drawing paper: faint dhsketch construction lines (head oval, centre line, brow, eye, nose and mouth lines, shoulders), dhsmudge stump tone inside the dark masses, dhhatch to the photo's values (fine and short in the face, finer still at the features, looser vine strokes in the coat), compressed-charcoal and pencil accents at the brows, eyes, nose and mouth, and hard-eraser dhlift streaks in the hair and on the lapel. The coat and the ground fade out raggedly, as in a real study.
The reference
This piece starts from a photograph, but reads it as data: every hatch, smudge and lift is drawn to the grid of darkness taken from the 1864 portrait, the way a student works from a photo pinned beside the easel. The reference is a 480 by 600 greyscale crop of the head and shoulders from Anthony Berger's photograph of Abraham Lincoln, taken at Mathew Brady's Washington gallery on 9 February 1864 (Ostendorf O-91). Source: the Library of Congress print, via Wikimedia Commons, File:Abraham Lincoln O-91 by Berger, 1864.png. It is in the public domain (a US work published before 1929, and marked public domain by Commons and the Library of Congress).
Details
- Category
- Drawing (dry media)
- Tags
- portrait reference study
- Libraries
- artkit, drycharcoal, drykit, etching, hatchkit, paintkit
- Added
- 2026-10-14
- Built in
- issue #242
- Page size
- 480 × 600 points
Source
View source the whole program in a scrolling window, or read gallery/lincoln_charcoal.ps on GitHub. To draw it yourself, from a checkout of the repository:
pscat --page 480x600 gallery/lincoln_charcoal.psThe first 40 of 325 lines of the source
%!PS-Adobe-3.0
%%Title: Study after Berger, 1864 — an art student's charcoal portrait of Lincoln
%%Creator: pscat drycharcoal (issue #242)
%%BoundingBox: 0 0 480 600
%%EndComments
% A third-year student's charcoal study after Anthony Berger's photograph
% of Abraham Lincoln, taken at Mathew Brady's Washington gallery on
% 9 February 1864 (Ostendorf O-91; the Library of Congress print, public
% domain; the Commons/LoC description names it the model for the
% five-dollar bill's portrait).
%
% Reference: gallery/references/lincoln_berger_1864.jpg, a 480 x 600
% greyscale crop of the head and shoulders. The page is the same 480 x
% 600, one point per photo pixel, so every coordinate below was measured
% off that crop (x right, y DOWN from the top, as the image reads) and
% the lcP helpers flip it to PostScript's y.
%
% The tonal map comes from the photo itself: lib/etching.ps's et-tonemap
% reads the JPEG into a grid of darkness, and the hatching and smudging
% below ask that grid how dark each place is. The drawing goes down the
% way a student lays it in:
% 1. faint construction lines: the head's oval, the centre line, the
% brow, eye, nose and mouth lines, the shoulders;
% 2. block-in of the big masses (hair, beard, coat) with the stump;
% 3. hatching to the photo's values, short and fine in the face,
% longer and looser in the coat, fading out toward the edges;
% 4. accents in compressed charcoal and pencil at the features;
% 5. highlights lifted with an eraser, in streaks through the hair and
% along the lapel.
% The clothes and the ground are left unfinished, as in a real study.
%
% Renders in pscat as-is (run from the repo root). Ghostscript refuses the
% file reads under -dSAFER: grant them by the paths as written,
% gs -dSAFER --permit-file-read=lib/ \
% --permit-file-read=gallery/references/lincoln_berger_1864.jpg \
% -sDEVICE=png16m -r144 -g960x1200 -o out.png gallery/lincoln_charcoal.ps
(lib/artkit.ps) run
(lib/paintkit.ps) run